BAGPIPES PLAY November, 1916.
After 140 days on the Somme, the storm of gunfire slackened.
Exhausted armies took their rest under skies that carried the first snows of winter.
1¼ million Europeans had been killed or maimed or had disappeared
in the shell-drenched uplands above the Somme.
The whole area had become an enormous graveyard at which three great nations mourned.
Field Marshal von Hindenburg expressed their grief...
Over everyone hovered the fearful spectre of this battlefield,
which, for desolation and horror, seemed to be even worse
than that of Verdun.
The millions of shell holes filled with water
or became mere cemeteries.
Neither of the contending parties knew the exultation of victory.
"Neither of the contending parties knew the exultation of victory."
This was true of the whole war, not just of the Somme.
Nowhere on the vast perimeter of the war, on the Eastern Front,
in Italy,
in the Balkans, had the battles of 1916 brought a decision.
As the wounded came home and a third winter of war closed in,
a chill gripped the hearts of all the belligerents.
The most depressing thing of all were the casualty lists.
Every time you opened a paper, it seemed to be nothing but casualty lists.
And you always found people in it that you knew.
Everybody wore black and that was very depressing.
After I found that it was officially known that he had been killed,
I used to pass my time trying to make little baby clothes for my baby
and I felt that I didn't want to live at all.
The world had come to an end for me because I'd lost all that I'd loved.
For over two years, victory had beckoned the obsessed nations.
Two years of immense effort and endurance, and still victory lay far off.
Men began to wonder how long could it go on?
How many more would die, how many more weep, before the victory?
An unfamiliar word began to be whispered...peace.
Rumours of peace offers and peace talks
spread from capital to capital across a Europe half-ruined by war.
Berlin. Excepting the wealthy and those who have stored quantities of food, everyone is undernourished.
Many people are starving.
Vienna. War weariness is growing
and the longing for peace is greater every day.
Rome. There are already in Italy symptoms of war weariness and discontent.
It would be wrong to say that there exists here a grim determination.
Petrograd. The losses which Russia has suffered in this war
are so colossal that the whole country is in mourning.
The impression is gaining ground that it is useless going on.
Paris. Full realisation of the horrors of war is kept alive
by the thousands of women in mourning, the number of buildings converted into hospitals,
the continual appearance of crippled soldiers and the marching of troops, bound for battle lands.
In October, Mr Asquith, the British Prime Minister, asked his Cabinet colleagues to consider
what acceptable peace terms might be demanded from Germany.
In reply, Lord Lansdowne asked a different and searching question...
No-one for a moment believes we are going to lose the war, but what is our chance of winning it?
Many of us must of late have asked ourselves how this war is ever to be brought to an end.
To many of us it seems as if the prospect of a knockout was, to say the least, remote.
Our own casualties already amount to over 1,100,000.
BUGLE PLAYS "The Last Post"
We have had 15,000 officers killed, not including those that are missing.
We are slowly but surely killing off the best of the male population of these islands.
In the matter of manpower, we are nearing the end of our tether.
The last report of the Manpower Distribution Board seems to sound a grave note of warning.
The unexhausted supply of men is now very restricted.
Availability can only be added to by further depletion of industry.
The army recruiting staff used every argument in its armoury
to persuade enough men to join up, but in vain.
By the end of 1915, the great surge of volunteers was drying up.
In January 1916, to meet the army's demands for fresh men,
the government reluctantly introduced conscription for single men between 18 and 41.
Only a noisy minority protested against the Military Service Act,
instead of the mass resistance throughout the country feared by the government.
In May, conscription was extended to married men as well.
The results were disappointing.
There were 3,400,000 Britons of military age,
but no fewer than 2,600,000 of them were in reserved occupations.
Kitchener's early appeals for volunteers
had been answered by thousands of workers whom industry could ill spare.
In Durham, coalminers had marched off to war en masse.
Now, in 1916, Britain and her allies clamoured for British coal,
coal for their war industries.
# The music of the land where we were born
# We'll remember the laughter
# And the sunshine after rain
# And we'll grin, grin, grin Till we win, win, win
# And they come back again. #
The President of the Board of Trade paints the picture in gloomy colours
and anticipates a complete breakdown in shipping.
The submarine difficulty is becoming acute.
In September 1916, just over 100,000 tons of British shipping were sunk.
By December, the monthly figure had risen to more than 180,000 tons.
In a year, nearly 1½ million tons of shipping had been lost
and only a third of this figure had been built to replace it.
Our shipbuilding is not keeping pace with losses and, although the number of our vessels is down,
the demands upon our tonnage are not diminished.
The increasing size of enemy submarines, the strength of their construction
point to the inescapable conclusion that in spite of all our efforts,
it seems impossible to provide an effective rejoinder to it.
As British shipping declined, the number of German U-boats doubled.
In 1916, 95 had been built and only 25 had been sunk.
The size of our home fleets is still insufficient.
We have nearly reached the limit of immediate production in the matter of capital ships.
We have not got enough destroyers for escort and anti-submarine work.
With the submarine apparently invincible,
the importance of producing food from British farms increased,
yet, Lord Lansdowne pointed out...
The President of the Board of Agriculture reports
that there is a world deficit in breadstuffs,
that the price of bread is likely to go higher, that there has been a general failure of the potato crop,
there is a shortage in the supply of feeding stuffs,
the difficulties of cultivation steadily increase,
land is likely to go derelict, the yield to decline and the number of livestock to diminish greatly,
the supply of fish is expected to be 64% below the normal.
The financial burden which we have already accumulated is almost incalculable.
We are adding to it at the rate of over £5m per day.
Generations will have to come and go before the country recovers from the financial ruin
and the destruction of the means of production which are taking place.
All this it is no doubt our duty to bear,
but only if it can be shown that the sacrifice will have its reward.
The responsibility of those who needlessly prolong such a war
is not less than that of those who needlessly provoke it.
Lansdowne's memorandum was a secret document.
But reports in every newspaper in 1916 hinted unmistakably
at failure, disappointment,
at sacrifice without reward.
On Easter Sunday, revolution exploded in the graceful streets of Dublin,
centre of English rule in Ireland since the Middle Ages.
1,500 men of the Sinn Fein party seized the General Post Office building,
turned it into a stronghold and proclaimed a republic of Ireland.
In two days, British troops crushed the rebellion with ruthless force.
An uneasy tranquillity was restored.
The citizens of Dublin came out of shelter and walked about the city,
surveying the wreckage with a bewildered unbelief.
The rising had been the work of extremists,
like those who had killed the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo.
Moderate Irishmen stood aside.
Thousands of Irish volunteers were fighting in the British army.
The British took this for granted.
They saw the Easter rebellion as treachery at a moment when the UK was battling for its very life.
In the next ten days, tension grew afresh in Ireland
as the British executed 15 of the captured rebel leaders.
Every shot resounded across Ireland, across the Atlantic Ocean, to the Irishmen in America.
Every shot created another martyr in Ireland's long struggle for nationhood.
After the executions, the British army in Ireland were seen, even by moderates, as an occupation force.
The homely men in khaki became a symbol of foreign oppression.
British bitterness against the Irish rebels was reflected by the great crowds outside the Old Bailey
during the treason trial of Sir Roger Casement.
Casement was an Irish patriot,
captured on the eve of the Rising after landing from a German U-boat.
He was eventually executed more than three months after the Easter rebellion.
Blazing indignation at Britain's actions swept the Irish community in America.
Their millions of votes were a factor in the American presidential election in the autumn.
There were those who feared, like Lloyd George,
that the British victory in Ireland might be bought at a high price.
The Irish American vote will go over to the German side.
Unless something is done, even provisionally, to satisfy America,
the Germans will break our blockade
and force on us an ignominious peace.
Lloyd George proposed immediate home rule,
but the blood of the martyrs prevented any peaceful solution in Ireland.
The extremists did not want compromise. They wanted total and unconditional victory.
Every belligerent sought that elusive prize.
On June 3rd, the most discouraging news of the war glared from the headlines of British newspapers.
The British Grand Fleet had at last encountered the German High Seas Fleet off Jutland
and apparently had had the worst of the battle.
Was this possible?
BUGLE PLAYS
They fired the first shot
and it went just over the Princess Royal...
Oh, about 50 yards.
The battle cruiser Indefatigable was the first to blow up
because of a flash down into the magazine from a German shell.
It was a terrific explosion.
The guns went up in the air like matchsticks, 12-inch guns they were.
She began to settle down and in about half a minute, she was gone.
Twenty minutes later, the Queen Mary followed.
Another ship's company paid with their lives for the inferiority of British design and material.
Yet a third British battle cruiser was similarly destroyed when the main fleets came into action.
When I saw the Invincible after the explosion,
she was just, to me, one flaming letter V.
She went down broken clean asunder in the midships, exactly like that.
Of course, after that, other ships had already gone,
many crippled,
and when we steamed through the main patch,
there was the men on rafts, bits of wood...
bravely cheering, waving...
And there was a smell of cordite, a smell of gas from shells
and also burnt bodies.
The Germans issued a communique which was quoted in newspapers throughout the world.
Our High Seas Fleet encountered on May 31st the main part of the English fighting fleet,
which was superior to our forces.
During the afternoon, a series of engagements developed between the Skagerrak and the Horn Reef,
which was successful for us.
GERMAN NATIONAL ANTHEM PLAYS
The British Admiralty did not say whether they considered the Battle of Jutland a victory or a defeat.
The newspapers drew the inevitable conclusion.
The Times said...
It is clear that we have suffered the heaviest damage at sea we have met during the war.
The British were stunned.
The navy was their deepest pride.
Four centuries of decisive victory lay behind the Royal Navy.
In 1916, the British people expected no less.
Instead, Germany's navy had had the best of an indecisive battle.
German ships had proved stronger, more deadly fighting machines.
Nevertheless, the German fleet had run back to port.
An American newspaper noted...
The German fleet has assaulted its jailer and is still in jail.
Hard on the heels of Jutland came more news of tragic loss at sea.
Lord Kitchener was dead, drowned in the cruiser Hampshire,
on his way to Russia.
For the last six months, his power had dwindled.
Control of the army had passed to General Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff.
Kitchener took leave of the country he had served so valiantly alone.
Lloyd George was to have been Kitchener's fellow passenger to Russia in the Hampshire,
but the aftermath of the Irish rebellion had taken him to Dublin instead.
Kitchener's memorial service was attended by vast crowds, stunned at the news of his death.
MUSIC: "Abide With Me"
To them, he had still been a man with the power of magic,
a titanic figure who had led and protected them amid the furies of this struggle...
Kitchener of Khartoum. Now he was gone.
The Irish rebellion, Jutland, Kitchener and the Somme,
a year that had begun so bright with hope
was growing old in loss and sadness.
MUSIC: "The First Noel"
It is the third Christmas of the war and the gloomiest.
To wish each other Merry Christmas is almost a mockery, of such is the prevailing gloom.
Our troubles appear to obtrude themselves upon us
more acutely today than at any other time.
We recall our fondest hope and belief last year
that this Christmas we should eat our dinner in peace.
For Germany, too, 1916 was closing in gloom.
For the first time since 1914, there had been few victories for the Fatherland to celebrate.
Germany had suffered nearly 1½ million casualties in one year,
fighting against growing odds in the west, in the Balkans and in the east.
Once again, that summer, her brittle ally, Austria, had broken before a Russian onslaught.
The worst crisis that the Eastern Front had ever known now began,
for this time there was no victorious German army standing by ready to save.
On August 27th, Romania declared war
and opened yet another hostile front against the central powers.
Germany's enemies had at last thrown their full weight against her with simultaneous violence.
The autumn of 1916 witnessed the most gigantic struggle in the history of the world.
Nearly 14 million allied soldiers against the nine millions of Germany and her allies.
The German army held on, but it was badly shaken.
In September, the Germans had begun to build a new line of defences
far behind their front on the Somme, deeper and more powerful than before - the Hindenburg Line.
Hindenburg told his officers...
We must save the men from a second Somme battle.
In Germany herself, people faced the winter's bitter cold
without fuel to warm the home and with little expectation to warm their hearts.
The British blockade was working.
Factory workers and schoolchildren lived on turnips, black bread and substitute foods.
Hindenburg wrote...
People at home had been bitterly disappointed by the military events of the last few months.
I regarded the country's morale as serious,
though it had not collapsed.
Victory seemed a long way away from Germany now.
In Austria, the dream had well nigh vanished.
On 21st November, the Emperor Franz Josef died.
BELL TOLLS
Hapsburg pomp and pride seemed to be buried with him.
His whole empire lay slowly dying, victim of the monstrous violence it had done so much to provoke.
Its polyglot population - Austrian, Hungarian or Slav -
yearned for food, for warmth, for war to cease.
With the venerable, white-haired emperor,
a large part of the national consciousness of the conglomerate empire sank into the grave.
Austrian political leaders made no secret that she could not stand any further burdens
in the way of military and political failures.
The new emperor Karl saw no salvation for his empire
or for the House of Hapsburg in a continuation of the long-drawn agony of the war.
Like his peoples, he yearned for an end to empty victories and bloody defeats.
In Ludendorff's words, he wanted peace.
CHEERING
The Russian Empire, too, was dying.
A dynasty that had ruled for 300 years
was collapsing under the blows of modern war.
The last hopes, the last energies of the loyal soldiers and brave officers of Holy Russia
had been poured into Brusilov's summer offensive.
Great advances, great booty, huge casualties.
And at the end, another hollow victory.
Since 1914, Russia had lost over 4½ million men, killed or wounded,
and another 2 million as prisoners.
Misery and discontent stalked the endless vistas of the Russian homeland.
In December, an observer wrote to Lloyd George...
In the next three months, either the government will yield, or there will be a revolution,
or Russia will have to stop fighting and make peace.
In France, the dying year brought the same bleak tally.
One in every six of the French adult population had passed into the armed forces.
One in every 25 of the entire French race was now dead or wounded or missing.
Verdun, the only French victory of 1916, had taken ten months to produce
at a cost which everyone understood to be immense.
A French soldier wrote...
What kind of nation will they make of us?
These exhausted creatures, emptied of blood, emptied of thought,
crushed by superhuman fatigue.
After two years of war,
France was calling up boys of 17,
and still the invader squatted immovably on her soil.
How long could she fight on?
The war can last a year longer
if our forces melt away at the same rate as in the preceding months.
France may emerge victorious from the struggle,
but she will be exhausted and will become a nation of the second rank.
Neither of the contending parties knew the exultation of victory.
To all of Europe, the price of elusive victory was proving higher and higher.
SHOUTING
Small wonder that men's minds turned to fresh concepts.
In Germany, the Imperial Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg
saw peace negotiations as the only way out of the catastrophe.
After two years of war, without any real prospect of an end,
I felt that the step was politically necessary.
The Germans captured Bucharest, capital of Romania, on 6th December
and this solitary victory gave Bethmann-Hollweg the springboard he needed.
As the German troops marched in, he sent a note to the US government...
Prompted by the desire to avoid further bloodshed and to make an end of the atrocities of war,
Germany, Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey have proposed to enter forthwith into peace negotiations.
If, in spite of this offer of peace and reconciliation, the struggle should go on,
Germany and her allies will continue it until a victorious end,
but they solemnly decline every responsibility for this before humanity and history.
The American president, Woodrow Wilson, and the Pope intervened
to ask the warring nations to state their peace terms.
Reactions were mixed.
In Britain, a few newspapers argued...
A summary rejection without reasons of the German offer by the Allies is out of the question.
But other papers demanded war until Germany was utterly smashed.
The question is the mastery between two wholly incompatible views of right or wrong,
of humanity, of civilisation and of law.
It does not admit of accommodation.
It can be settled only by the defeat of one principle or of the other.
Disillusion and disappointment at the end of 1916 did not draw men towards peace,
but these feelings undermined the leaders associated with costly deadlock.
In Great Britain, Lloyd George had replaced Asquith.
All Lloyd George's instinct drew him towards new methods of waging war.
I thought, rightly or wrongly, that there was hesitation,
vacillation and delay,
and that we were not waging this war with the determination, promptitude and relentlessness
with which it MUST be waged.
It is a national war.
Everyone must contribute
and it is on that basis alone
we shall be able to achieve a great triumph.
So Lloyd George became Britain's leader.
In Germany, with his peace moves a failure, it was Bethmann-Hollweg's turn to go.
The army leaders, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, now led Germany from behind a figurehead chancellor.
In each country, ruthless men replaced the more moderate.
Ludendorff wrote...
The war had to continue and had to be decided by force of arms. It had to be victory or defeat.
There were further preparations on a large scale, the maintenance of our determination to fight
and the employment of every weapon in Germany's arsenal.
The Germans believed that they had found a new means to early victory,
a submarine used to sink all ships at sight, even neutrals, even Americans approaching Allied ports.
The Chief of Naval Staff was confident that the campaign would have decisive results in six months.
The loss of freight and imports would produce economic difficulties in England
that would render a continuance of the war impossible.
Lloyd George recognised the force of this threat.
The submarine must be beaten, or Britain would starve...
The jugular vein of Allied vitality was the sea.
If that vein were once cut off...
..the Allied strength would soon be drained of its lifeblood.
Lloyd George pressed the convoy system on a reluctant Admiralty,
which believed it couldn't work.
The larger target offered by a convoy was no more vulnerable than each single ship would have been.
A submarine was unable to count on firing more than a single shot,
as it was at once attacked
by the escorts and the guns of the convoy vessels.
Victory at sea depended on whether British shipyards could launch more new ships than those that sank.
Shipyard workers were exhorted to speed construction.
Lloyd George's new shipping controller began revolutionary new programmes,
building standardised tramp steamers, even prefabricated ships which never saw a shipyard.
Another weapon against this attempt to starve Britain was the land.
Lloyd George told his countrymen...
Every available square yard must be made to produce food.
The labour available for tillage must not be turned to ornamental purposes
until the food necessities of the country have been adequately safeguarded.
# Keep the home fires burning
# While your hearts are yearning
# Though your lads are far away
# ..Till the boys come home. #
Even the lakes in the royal parks became freshwater fisheries in the drive for food.
Milk and sugar and meat remained very scarce and were only rationed by price.
The burden of sacrifice fell on the poor.
There were demonstrations and protest meetings against the high cost of living.
This mass meeting emphatically protests against the inaction of the government on the food question.
The inflated prices are largely due to the profiteers who are taking advantage of the national crisis
to exploit our people.
Lloyd George appointed a Food Controller to cut down wasteful methods of distribution.
He appealed to the nation to ration itself.
The saving of food means the saving of tonnage.
And the saving of tonnage is at the present moment the very life of the nation.
New leaders, new methods, in Britain and Germany.
France, too, saw change.
General Joffre, victor of the Marne, commander in chief of the French armies throughout the war,
seemed unable to produce new ideas.
His weary countrymen now associated his name with attrition and failure.
The French government was in danger
so Joffre was sacrificed with the title of Marshal of France.
General Robert Nivelle, his successor,
promised what France in her weariness and grief so desperately wanted - swift, immediate victory.
We have the formula. With it, we shall beat the enemy.
French politicians clung to Nivelle with desperation.
# Keep the home fires burning... #
The bitterest winter in living memory gripped Europe.
For the ordinary people, it was a time of hunger and cold, anxiety and sadness.
But they knew their duty. They believed their cause was right.
In France and Britain and Germany, there was a grim resolve to fight on.
# ..silver lining Through the dark cloud shining
# Turn the dark cloud inside out
# Till the boys come home. #